Top MarTech Predictions for 2019: 11 Experts Share Their Vision

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Shalaka has been a journalist for almost a decade, having worked with media houses like the Times of India and the All India Radio. Apart from her ability to whip up articles about literature, science, arts, music, fashion, and pop culture, Shalaka is also a published author and a self-confessed pedant. In her free time, you'll find her either cooking up plots for her next book or baking cakes.

As we welcome 2019, 11 leaders from various brands and fields of expertise share their top MarTech predictions for the industry.

Will AI take over all aspects of marketing? Will CDP reign supreme in 2019? What will be the role of predictive analytics in personalization?

11 MarTech experts answer all these and more questions as they share their vision for 2019 with MarTech Advisor. Read on for some of the most interesting MarTech predictions for 2019.

1. Wider adoption of machine learning applied to analytics in real time

The conversational UX trend will continue, enabling users to interact with organizations, combining chat, voice or any other natural language interfaces. Moreover, on the back of the likes of Alexa (Amazon Echo), Google Home, or Erica from Bank of America, voice commands will play a larger role in how customers engage with service providers and e-tailers. We will also see wider adoption of machine learning applied to analytics in real time, which will make it easier for enterprises to detect – as it happens – when and why online visitors are struggling on digital channels, or when technical anomalies are occurring; and remedy these in an agile way. This will all be part of an industry trend towards more holistic digital customer management, that will encompass not only enhancing technical performance and availability of digital channels, but also optimizing online customer experiences, increasing customer service effectiveness, protecting customers and organizations from a compliance angle, fighting against online fraud, and much more.

2. Continued rise in programmatic advertising and consumer-friendly features

The exponential rise in programmatic advertising will continue unabated in 2019, in mobile, video, over-the-top, social media, podcasting and more. This necessitates more relevance than ever for recognized, privacy-enhancing advertising transparency, notice and choice. Use cases like the Digital Advertising Alliance’s new “Political Ads” Icon, the IAB EU’s “Transparency and Consent Framework,” and Ads.txt are examples of such innovations. New technologies in programmatic and RTB in 2019 can leverage existing privacy solutions—in fact, they should, or else they will hit setbacks with consumers who now expect more.

3. Confluence of customer acquisition and retention

In a platform economy, brands pay platforms to reach their customers and prospects. At the same time, it's getting harder for brands to differentiate themselves on first-level platforms like Google, Facebook, or Amazon since every marketer has access to the same data and targeting options. Utilizing proprietary data of existing customers systematically across all funnel stages, brands can provide more relevant content and have a better chance of staying in the consideration set of their customers in a cost-efficient way. Hence, the confluence of customer acquisition and retention is one of the chief trends we see for 2019. Customer retention can increasingly be seen as re-acquisition and as the effort of staying within the consideration set of their customers until the next purchase decision. From the lower funnel back to the upper funnel, companies have to utilize knowledge and develop suitable automation and personalization. All necessary data points should be connected through flawless processes and the consideration of data protection requirements, for which we are ideally positioned in the EU.

Conversational AI will challenge us to re-think what marketing is and what marketing does. Through conversational AI, we now have an unprecedented ability to learn about our customers and prospects, experiment with targeted messaging faster than ever before. More traditionally-minded marketers will use it to automate knowledgebase lookups and provide a simplified interface to canned responses. Progressive marketers will embrace the learning potential and use it to understand the needs of their audience more deeply. In addition to the obvious partnership with sales, truly savvy marketers will partner with their customer success, product management, and user experience peers to maximize the impact of conversational AI on the business.

5. The CMO will need to start sharing the tech spend with the CRO

It's become a de facto standard that the CMO often has the biggest tech budget. Big technology spends shifted heavily to the marketing organization because of the immense investment in MarTech. We can now expect that sales organizations will need to drive highly-specialized tech themselves to keep up with the investment of the marketing investment and their competitors. These technology investments can augment salespeople's capabilities to make them more productive – in the same way, MarTech has – to make it more personalized, faster, etc.

The traditional approach to measuring employee communications has been "analytics by channel," i.e., looking at clicks, opens or page views on various channels and tools — a siloed method where you can't deduce a cohesive storyline. Realizing this doesn't meet their needs, communicators are now starting to turn to "unified analytics," a new approach set to dominate 2019 that is more in line with how we view the world — looking at content engagement as a proxy for engagement within a company and overall organizational health. By unifying analytics across specific employee groups and channels (mobile app, kiosk, digital signage, intranet, email, etc.), communicators can see holistically what resonates and the common threads across groups of employees to shape their content and storytelling strategies. In the future, this will even let them be predictive about the types of messages to deliver to certain groups of employees to drive even greater engagement.

7. AI Will Give Marketing a Makeover

AI has the potential to make marketing much smarter in both prediction and responsiveness, determining a buyer’s intent while delivering ‘just in time’ personalized solutions at the moment of consideration. Call analytics will leverage AI like never before, empowering marketers with data points that help improve the customer experience across communication channels, from the marketing campaign through the interaction at the store, dealer or call center.

8. AI will help enhance customer experience

Analytics continues to be a critical way to review the impact of marketing on business objectives. In 2019, the continued adoption of dashboard reporting and analysis systems will improve how we measure marketing programs and tactics. With a better understanding of all marketing functions, organizations can take a more strategic approach and focus on what's performing best. We also believe marketing and customer engagement will be an excellent first use-case for enterprise AI. AI systems can analyze structured and unstructured data to identify opportunities for marketing outreach, customer support, and other actions that enhance overall customer experience.

Predictive analytics plays a starring role in allowing companies to be proactive rather than reactive. Firstly, predictive analytics is the key technology in trendspotting, allowing companies to identify and track consumer trends before their peak of popularity and widespread adoption. This gives brands the ability to make increasingly forward-looking and informed marketing and product development decisions. For example, in retail, forecasting is used to keep up with seasonal trends and new product lines. In 2019, we will doubtlessly see more enterprises employing predictive analytics to ensure they're creating the best possible products for the savvy modern consumer.

Furthermore, forecasting allows you to know when, why, and how your customer shops – essentially, building a 360-degree view of the consumer. Marketers can build ideal plans and campaigns with this information. Having a data-driven approach to marketing and the customer journey in 2019 will be a necessity, and we will undoubtedly see predictive analytics become more and more ubiquitous across industries.

10. Retail will see a CDP and AI surge

For retailers, using a CDP will go from being a nice-to-have to a must-have. In 2018, the CDP market was crowded with vendors posturing as CDPs. In 2019, the definition will become clarified, and many of the so-called CDP vendors will fall by the wayside, and a few will emerge as CDP leaders. As retailers face increasing competition from Amazon, brands must differentiate on something other than price. Maximizing profitability of the customer base, while providing relevant, quality experiences to consumers, will be what makes a retailer successful vs. becoming obsolete.

In 2019, I believe, we'll see the next phase of AI in marketing. Rather than just being predictive, next-gen AI will be prescriptive and will give marketers specific guidance about what campaigns to implement, what follow-on actions to take when a customer engages, where to invest for the highest return, etc. Rather than automating these processes, marketers will turn to AI as a trusted advisor for what marketing actions they should take for maximum results.

11. Cloud and CCM adoption will continue to grow

The cloud has officially come of age. Security fears have been eased, and the benefits have been confirmed. Cloud adopters will also experience reduced time to benefit, overall lower cost of ownership, and more agile, scalable and tightly-integrated technology stacks.

Cloud-based customer communications management (CCM) platforms allow personalized communications to be delivered quickly and at scale—meeting multiple critical needs. These tools put business users in control and also allow for multiple systems to be seamlessly integrated. This increases internal efficiency while also delivering a more consistent and rewarding experience for consumers. It's a win-win, and we see 2019 as the year that these benefits are realized by a tremendous number of companies in the financial services, insurance, and healthcare industries in particular.